What Makes Them Tick
by Cheesus333
Summary: A mechanically-minded scavenger and his dedicated partner do their best to survive in the wasteland, facing countless dangers and trials as they try to carve out a place for themselves.
1. Chapter 1

The workshop, as I called it, was about 7 metres by 10, which was plenty of room for anything I needed to do. It housed a bed, as well as a few basic kitchen appliances (all of which I had repaired myself), but none of that was particularly important. The main feature was the array of workbenches, computers and other apparatus that was scattered about the room. This was what made my home my workplace – I was a scavenger by day and an engineer by night, repairing things I found in my scrounging or putting scraps together to make something from scratch. This was my living – when I accrued a decent amount of marketable wares, I hauled it onto a wagon and dragged it to a settlement or tribe, and pawned off my items for caps (or just food and water, if times were desperate).

But none of that mattered at that moment, because there was a .44 calibre bullet about to introduce itself to my skull.

"Give us your caps and we'll let you go. Don't, and we'll fuck you up. Then take them anyway."

It wasn't the first time my wagon had been raided as I'd set out on my rounds, but it _was_ the first time I'd been unable to kill them all before they got close. Three remained now, and at least one of them had a gun pressed to my head. Given the situation, it was difficult to keep track.

"I- don't have- any y-yet" I stammered pathetically. I was a good shot – actually, that's not fair, I was a brilliant shot, but my handling of life-or-death situations was somewhat lacking. Right now, fear had taken over my main functions. I was just trying to stay alive.

"With a cart piled this high? Don't shit me, brother. I want your goddamn caps – give them to me."

I slowly raised my hands over my head, brushing the gun as I did so. My suspicions were correct: it was my gun. _My_ fucking gun. Bastards!

But of course... this was brilliant. I'd known this would happen.

"Pull that trigger." I said with utter confidence.

"What? I don't think you understa-"

"You heard me," I said, rising. I turned to face him. He held my gun, and followed my head with the end. "Pull the fucking trigger."

"Get back down man, I swear to God I will end you!" He barked. Confusion in his voice overruled the anger. I had him.

"You gonna shoot me then? Are you gonna gun me down, cowboy?" I yelled, mocking. I laughed. My assailant's companions had turned to watch. They only had a bat and an iron bar between them. What a joke!

There was a click. Surprise coloured the Raider's face as his finger clenched against the trigger. The hammer fell... but the bullet stayed put.

"Hmph. Let me try." I said, before suddenly jabbing his throat. It was a potent punch, and the Raider doubled over in shock. I seized the Magnum, and turned it on him.

_Bang._ _Crack. Thud._

These were the sounds that followed my pulling the trigger. His skull was shattered, and he collapsed immediately. Blood quickly pooled around him, and I stepped back. The other Raiders looked on in horror.

"I'm an engineer, you know. A damn good one. So someone as talented as me knows you can DNA-code your guns to only respond to your touch. With the right mods, anyway. They weren't cheap, and they were a bitch to install, but..." I flourished the gun, spinning it on my finger and stopping it with a squeeze of the hand. "I'd say it was worth it."

The Raiders, recovering from their petrification, charged at me with their weapons. They didn't get close.

The bodies were easily disposed of. I kept the leader's hand as a trophy of sorts, celebrating the triumph of forethought and preparation over brutishness and arrogance. It had also helped that I was clinically paranoid and schizophrenic, but... hell, any advantage was a good advantage.

The hand was mounted on a small spike, fingers up, in a sort of lazy wave. From that day I greeted it with a wave back whenever I awoke, or came in from scavenging or selling. But it was also a reminder – that it was too dangerous to be in this business alone. I needed a partner, maybe even a protector. Someone I could travel with and live with, who could guarantee comfort and security in return for care and shelter.

Thankfully, that was when I met Bonnie Campbell.

She, like me, was obviously in need of a companion. I could tell: she was being savaged by a Deathclaw. The creature had pinned her down – literally, by the leg – and was clawing at her inert body. She was unconscious, but not dead. Not to toot my own horn, but she was lucky I showed up when I did. One round through the beast's head saved her life, but it took a lot of medical care on my part to bring her round. I wasn't an accomplished doctor, or even a basic practitioner of first aid, but I managed. I just thought of her as a machine, but with biological components. Then it became a lot simpler. Machines I understood.

When Bonnie eventually awoke, she thanked me with a long, sobbing hug. I did my best to return it, but I was no people-person. I'd never hugged anyone before. Bonnie pledged herself to my service, as a sort of life-debt. She felt like she owed me it, so I accepted. It suited my needs just as much as hers.

So I got my partner, and she got hers. She turned out to be a pretty terrible mechanic, but I was hardly expecting great things from the girl I'd found half-dead in the Wasteland. I took it upon myself to train her, and she was a capable student. She never seemed to make anything that worked, or lasted, but I'll be damned if she didn't try. However, she was a brilliant fighter. The ones I couldn't pick off with my guns, she could finish with her clubs; swords; even fists if there was nothing to hand. They all went down quickly enough, and I always polished them off with a round to the head. Bonnie was what I required, what I had always needed.

And that's how our adventures began.


	2. Chapter 2

It wasn't long before Bonnie opened up to me. A couple of days after I found her, in fact. I remember it well.

"I don't have a family." This was what she'd chosen with which to break one of the frequent silences between us. "Or any friends. I was walking alone, when the... the Deathclaws jumped me."

I wasn't sure what to say, so I watched her steadily as she continued. "I've never met my parents, they... died, I suppose. I don't remember anyone actually raising me, all there is when I think back is loneliness and independence. I've always been distant around people, never staying anywhere long enough to make connections. I can fight, but only out of necessity. The Wasteland was cruel to a young girl raising herself. I had to learn how to hit, and kill. I do what I have to."

There was a long pause, wherein she gazed thoughtfully at the floor. I looked at her then, sizing her up as I hadn't done before. She had rusty auburn hair, which fell in layers around a fair-skinned face containing black-brown eyes the colour of volcanic glass. She was surprisingly well-kept for a Wasteland dirt-child: I had just assumed she washed herself thoroughly but there was a glow to her face that suggested more than just good hygiene. This girl wasn't just healthy, she was _pure_, as if some element of her was too much for even the filth of the Wasteland to corrupt. She was slim, too, which I attributed to a lifestyle of running and fighting to get through the day. She held herself with a quaint awkwardness, fidgeting with her hands as she spoke and never looking up from the floor. I realised that it must have taken a long time for her to build up the courage to speak. I decided to return the favour.

"Where... did you get your – name?" She looked up, apparently surprised by my response. "Bonnie. You said you'd never settled in with anyone. Where did – you get that?" She hesitated before answering.

"Some traveller said it as I passed once, a long time ago. He must have been from somewhere far away because his accent was weird. He said to his partner, 'now there's a bonnie lass'. I didn't know what it meant. I still don't. But I took it as a first name, and when he introduced himself, I took his last. Campbell. Bonnie Campbell."

"It means pretty."

"What?"

"Bonnie. It's... foreign, old. It means pretty."

"Oh," she smiled to herself as if accepting the compliment she'd received a lifetime ago.

"It suits you." I sounded a lot more anxious than I was when I talked to her, but I was really quite relaxed. I just didn't talk to people much.

"Thank you." She replied without emotion.

That was all I ever really learnt of her. She didn't open up much after that, so to me she was always Bonnie Campbell, the Wasteland dirt-child with nary a relative or acquaintance in the world. Except for me, it seemed. At some point it just became an accepted fact that we would travel together.

And travel we did. Although the workshop was still our home (throwing down another raggedy mattress did the job of housing us both), we never stayed there for more than a day at a time, and that was just to work on what we gathered the rest of the time. And as far as gathering was concerned, business was booming, because Bonnie made herself useful almost immediately.

"Just so... you, know... I know a place filled with stuff like this. You might like it."

"Stuff like this? What's stuff like this?"

"Um, all this old tech and scrap. Junk, but useful junk."

"Salvage? You know a salvage cache?"

"Yes. Would you like to go there?"

"How do you know about something like... like a salvage cache?"

"I always needed places to stay when I was out on my own, and usually they were raided or picked clean by scavengers. But this one, I think it's pretty well hidden. I stayed there for a long time. Only moved on because I got bored, and complacent."

"That seems reckless. Wasn't it safe?"

"Yeah, it was safe. But it was also boring. Do you want to go there?"

I didn't see the point in wasting more time with conversation, so we left. Or, rather, we would have left, if it weren't for the three well-armed, well-armoured men stood in our way.

"Oh. It's you." I said, by way of an unhappy greeting.

"Cut the shit, Wastelander. We heard you've got some good tech up here. Simply put, we want it."

I leant in to Bonnie to whisper, "it's the Brotherhood of Steel. We have to be careful with this, they'll kill us in a heartbeat."

"Unless we kill them first?" Bonnie suggested.

"Well-guessed. Follow my lead." I put on my confident 'bartering' face, and approached the leader. He instantly raised his laser rifle, and his subordinates mimicked him. I raised open hands. "Whoah, calm down, we can be civil. I'm sure we can arrange something. Do you want to buy, maybe?"

"No. We want to take. In fact, we _will_ take. The only difference will be whether you're standing or smouldering during the procedure."

"Look-look-look-look!" I pleaded, smiling falsely. "I've got all sorts of things. Like this, for instance." I retreated through the door, and slowly emerged with a small device. To them, it must surely have looked like a simple grenade or canister. To me, it was the best weapon for the situation.

As planned.

The leader of the squad dropped his weapon for a moment. "What is it?" He enquired, puzzled.

"An electromagnet, basically. But it also has certain functions you might like – for instance, it boosts the protective capability of your power armour by two hundred percent. It reduces bullet impact, lessening dents and minimising the force you feel. It'll also attract small shards of metal within a tiny radius, which is useful for picking up scrap and recyclable materials as you go." I was, as some might put it, bullshitting. It certainly magnetic, but helping him was the last thing I had in mind. I approached the leader, and extended the device towards his gloved, waiting hand. "Try it."

He reached out, then hesitated, and raised his weapon. "You must think I'm pretty damn stupid, filth. Who knows what that could do...? In fact, you try it."

I silently sighed, and shrugged to myself. There was no point in acting anymore. Whilst fun, the leader's bravado was beginning to try my temper. "No, I really think _you_ should," I insisted, simultaneously bringing my arm swiftly round in an arc and clamping the little cylinder onto his wrist plate. It held firmly, and I immediately hammered a button in with my thumb before diving to the ground, making sure to take Bonnie down with me.

Then the world turned white. A brilliant flash of light consumed all, and I used the confusion to apply two more identical magnets onto the other two soldiers. Having pressed each button, they both flashed their own blinding nova, and I retreated to observe the carnage.

Upon pressing the button, a flash was released and, seconds after that, the device administered a thick liquid at hundreds upon hundreds of degrees Celcius into what it was applied to. The squad's armour turned vibrantly red and then a gooey orange; the dirt beneath them became a filthy glass; muffled, tortured screams filled the area as the Brotherhood troops were thoroughly cooked and liquefied within their armour. Bonnie, now by my side, gazed on in fascinated horror. I smiled secretly to myself. I'd tried it out on a few mannequins clad in recovered armour before, with similar – albeit quieter – results. But I was glad it had passed the field test.

The chaos was over within moments. Only three solemn piles of metal slag remained on a patch of glass. The air was warm with the radiated heat of the metal, and I wiped a thin layer of sweat from my brow. Bonnie looked on in silence. Finally, she spoke.

"You made those? The little magnets?"

"I did."

"That's impressive. I'm... impressed."

"I'm very relieved. If you'd found something wrong with the idea, I would probably have had to let you go." She paused.

"Well they're not exactly _clean,_ bu-" Bonnie stopped short, interrupted by my stare. "No, they're fine. Let's go, it's a long way to the cache."

And we did go, leaving the arrogant squad leader and his loyal minions to cool, harden and bake in the fallout-hazed morning sun.


	3. Chapter 3

There's only one thing any wary wanderer needs to know about the wastes: they're big. Damn big. Big enough to lose yourself in if you don't know where you're going, and big enough to lose _everything_ if you get lost on the way. But big doesn't always mean empty - just as space is full of stars, the wastes had pinpricks of activity shining through the blank, irradiated canvas. The jewel of New Vegas is the most notable of these, and this is where we made our first stop. It was just a little south of my house, maybe a few miles, and I journeyed there with the cart sometimes to sell my wares. But this time we were visiting for a different reason.

"It's a long way." Bonnie said, by way of explanation for our visit to the capital of the Mojave wastes. "I wandered pretty far before I came here, so..." She trailed off into silence, apparently distracted by the district of Freeside. We'd arrived by now, and it was apparent that Bonnie hadn't been before. It was always easy to tell the new arrivals. They always made the easiest prey for those who lurked in dark corners.

But Bonnie was, for all intents and purposes, in my care, so I didn't think she was at risk of succumbing to any dirty deals. I decided to revive the conversation.

"We're here for supplies, yes?"

"That's right. We'll need a lot of food, as rad-free as possible... and water."

"That might be a problem then..." I replied, scowling at the rundown zone's inhabitants. A child scurried past, chasing a mutated beast with a stick and yelling bizarre curses. "Freeside has a water shortage going on right now. What little there is usually goes to those who can afford it, or the people at the old Mormon fort. And we aren't either of those."

"I didn't say we were here to buy it," Bonnie added with what I thought must have been a sly grin. "Trust me. I can get what we need."

We arrived at the fort itself – Bonnie had chosen this place to prove her talents.

"You'll need to be on watch. I can find where they keep it, but I can't say that it will be left unguarded. I can probably say it _will_ be guarded, in fact. So get ready to make a quick exit."

"I don't think I'm okay with killing these people, Bonnie."

"We're not going to. I need to you to trust me, okay?"

"You don't sound your shy self."

"When it's important, I come out of my shell. Now let's get to work."

I was wrong to have doubted her – Bonnie was a master thief. It made sense, really: a girl living by herself had to either kill or steal to get by, and this young Wastelander, as seasoned as she was, didn't look like a killer. But theft she could manage, and apparently living with the consequences and knock-on effects for her victims wasn't a problem either. Bonnie extracted the bottles from the supply room with minimal effort, slipping each one into her bag as they clinked against one another inside. When her work was done, she retreated from the chamber to find herself face to face with a stunned-looking guard. I didn't clearly see what happened, but he went down with a low groan immediately. The girl was good.

He wasn't dead. I was glad of that: isolation and emotional detachment had long since freed me of any moral concerns regarding the people I killed, but it was always harder to explain if I was caught. Unsurprisingly, grievous bodily harm carried a more lenient penalty than cold-blooded murder. I hadn't felt anything for the lives I ended since my first. It was when I was barely more than a child, just turned sixteen. Raiders, in their typical archaic bliss, had brought guns and steel upon my parents as I watched, petrified, through a narrow crack in the wardrobe door. There were three of them, adorned in crimson-tainted leather scraps and chunks of steel shrapnel over vital areas. Their hair was chaotic; their eyes, callous. Nothing but glee filled them as they hacked at the wailing figures that convulsed violently with every blow. Eventually, the screams subsided into a low, whimpering moan. When that ended too, the twitching stopped. Everything was still – as traumatised as I was, I was morbidly fascinated by the eerie serenity that hung in the air after the kill. I would learn to love it when the killing was my own. But still I wept, and had I not choked it down I'm sure I wouldn't be alive to recount this tale.

Two of the Raiders left, having ransacked my family's meagre possessions and taken a moment to sully the carcasses of their victims with vulgar gestures and juvenile laughter. The third remained, crouched over the body of my mother and wiping some blood off her cheek with his finger. He slowly touched it to his lips, and grinned. As he began to raise her tattered shirt and moved his hands sensually around upon the mounds beneath, I saw what was coming. It was one of the few times anger overcame me.

I leapt from the rotted wooden wardrobe, splintering the door as I did so. Fragments of wood rained down on the vest of the Raider, and I followed, landing monkey-style on his back. I wrapped my legs tightly like a cobra around his waist and beat his skull and face with balled fists. He yelped in confusion and pulled at my arms, desperately trying to drag me off. When this was still unsuccessful, my weight dragged him backwards to the ground. He landed hard on me, but I was too infuriated to notice. I scrambled onto his chest, pinning his arms with my knees, and clutched at his throat. The Raider gazed at me in silent, startled horror as he began to choke. Then he could only wheeze.

I raised my free hand, quivering as I did it, and pushed it far back into his mouth, slowly. He flailed his legs and wrists, but I didn't stop. I just sank my hand in, further and further as blood and vomit began to well in his throat. His death throes climactically intensified, then gradually became little more than light pushes against my shaking arms. At last, they ceased. Tears fell from my cheeks and splashed onto his motionless features, cleansing a little of the grime that had encrusted his face.

I rolled off his corpse, breathless and panting, and briefly watched the events of the last half a minute flicker vividly before my eyes. My weeping caught in my throat and I coughed and coughed, wretching until I was sick. I wiped my mouth, and drew the Raider's knife from his belt. Turning it over in my hands, I saw it was still sticky with my father's gore.

That was the first and last time I let murder get the better of me.

Killing the Raiders outside was simple. Only one of them had any ammo, so I swung the door open slowly and seized her around the waist. I drew the knife to her neck and carved a red line in her skin. Blood poured out in torrents and she gagged. The second – the leader, from the snippets of conversation I'd witnessed - was stunned, and as he recovered and went for his gun I let him. He raised it to me and pulled the trigger. It clicked. I smiled.

I remember torturing him. I remember listening to him as he begged for mercy and shaking my head vindictively. I remember granting him his death, slowly, sinking the knife into the back of his skull as he wailed and taking my sweet time doing it. Finally, I stripped him of his clothing and impaled him upon a jagged hook I had mounted above the door. I etched a warning message into his torso with the nearly-blunt knife and displayed him for the world, let them know that this was not a safe place. When I left, weeks later, I burnt it down after me. It smouldered for a time but the fires are long since gone.

"Good work, Bonnie." I said to my proud-looking accomplice as she displayed the contents of her bag. "This will do nicely for our trip, I think."

We stayed overnight, and left at dawn. I don't think about what happened back then anymore.


End file.
